Reckless : My Life As a Pretender (9780385540629)

by Hynde, Chrissie

  My friends and I ran up and down the defunct platform, imagining what it must have been like to ride on a train back in the “olden days.” Those times seemed so far away by the mid-sixties. None of us had ever been on a train. Eventually, the disused station and platform disappeared altogether, and all the hotels closed.

  —

  Having transferred my father from Cleveland back to Akron, the phone company sent him back to Cleveland. This time, rather than move us again he decided to commute, along with millions of others—one man to a car.

  The heavy traffic regularly came to a standstill at rush hour, and it would be sweltering in the summer and brutally cold in the winter. The cars battled the elements with special snow tires (good news for Rubber City). Personally, I would have preferred to sit on a train and read the paper, but that wasn’t the American way. No one wanted to share their space with strangers. Heaven forbid they might not even be white. Although no one would have openly admitted it, racial mixing, which was inevitable, was a cultural conundrum, to put it politely.

  Everybody had to own and maintain a car. It was the biggest con in the Land of the Free. Well, along with the tobacco and alcohol industries, which also pumped out poison and had the nation in their grip. Pharmaceuticals and firearms would join the party in due course. Through advertising—both explicitly and stealthily—these “necessities” would corral us. We were setting our own ambush. And don’t forget factory farming. Yeah, we were digging our own graves. We’d thought the Amish were the odd ones out, regarding them as out of step with the times for decades, but it was increasingly obvious that it was us: self-destructing and taking everything with which we came into contact down with us.

  American households had no room for Grandma, but the car’s needs were paramount. Every new house had a built-in garage or two. The countryside was being enveloped by concrete, and the tracks that had once been used to ferry passengers were now the sole preserve of freight trains.

  Jack Kerouac described romantic characters who jumped into those empty cars and headed out west—hobos. I wanted to be a hobo. I was alarmed by the trend, but more alarmed by the fact that no one else seemed bothered.

  —

  Nita and I looked in the window of the Old Gold Store, the last of the pawnshops on South Howard Street. Old things. We wanted to touch artifacts in a world where everything old was cast aside. Soon South Howard would be bulldozed out of the way for another inner belt that led to nowhere, the Martin Luther King freeway.

  There were only a few shops left struggling to stay alive along West Market Street as it approached the decaying downtown. Gilbert’s Mexican shop was an oddity but beloved to Nita and me. Why Akronites would want to buy Mexican goods was anybody’s guess, but when hippie fashion became de rigueur the fringed moccasins and jackets at Gilbert’s were like gold dust to the five or six of us in town who had Moby Grape, Buffalo Springfield and Steppenwolf albums.

  Walking was outmoded but walking was where I did all my thinking, and I thought nothing of setting out in any weather. I walked to school with icicles in my hair, which I washed like Cher did every morning (according to 16 magazine). I crashed over on frozen sidewalks, my knees like crushed walnuts, but kept walking. I slipped in the slush, ruined my boots in the salt, ripped my stockings in snowdrifts, but kept walking. I marched to Barb Martin’s house through sleet and rain to listen to Kinks records. I trudged in the suffocating heat to Manners Big Boy for hot fudge sundaes, Amy Joy Donuts at Wallhaven for glazed crullers, Woolworth’s for 3 Musketeers bars and 16 magazines, where I first saw a picture of Jane Asher and got the idea to cut my bangs. I journeyed down into the metropolitan park, ambling along the wooded paths and up to Debbie Smith’s house, knowing Selma, her mother, would have a cheesecake waiting. “Chris! Eat! Don’t you know Jews equate food with love?” I loved going over there.

  I hiked to Dianne’s on Waldorf Drive, swung on the trapeze, then dove into a bowl of chocolate marshmallow ice cream. (It’s a miracle I’m not diabetic.) I walked along the tracks that ran beside Nita’s house with wonder and longing, imagining how far into the distance they stretched. Where did they go? I wanted to find out.

  But I never saw anyone else walking on my adventure tours because there was no longer anything within walking distance. The corner shops that used to service every neighborhood were boarded up. You’d have to allow an hour to get to the nearest shopping plaza on foot, and not mind trucks and cars thundering along next to you as they negotiated their way around drive-through banks, drive-through diners, drive-through liquor stores and drive-in theaters.

  When I started to realize that the days of walking were numbered, I subconsciously began to plan my getaway. Was I going to have to buy a car so I could get to work so I could pay for my car? Everyone around me was rushing towards the trap, and I was getting nervous. There was a meter running in me like a cab’s, and although I’d never been in a cab I could feel it ticking over.

  —

  American cities boast about “urban renewal,” but Akron’s trajectory was essentially urban removal. Controlled climate, Muzak, uniformity and a parking space replaced the event of going downtown. Chances were, you wouldn’t be getting out of your car, so why bother about personal deportment? Ordinary people lost all sense of glamour in any kind of daily context. People were becoming “slobs.” You didn’t see any of that in those black-and-white pictures of the forties.

  English bands were amazed when they got to a hotel in the Midwest and asked at the front desk where the nearest shop was. “Yes, would you like me to call you a taxi?” They could see the mall from the lobby but couldn’t walk to it. There’d be no place to cross the eight lanes of traffic between the hotel and smoke shop. They’d have to get a car. Traditionally, touring would leave them looking shipwrecked and scrawny. Six weeks on tour in America and they’d go home fattened-up like penned hogs.

  The soullessness of mall culture eventually drove a huge portion of the youth population out of town altogether, as moving out of the parental house and getting an apartment downtown was no longer something to aspire to. If you wanted to move to an urban environment you’d have to go to New York City.

  In Akron, urban life no longer existed. I found that diehard Akronites like my parents had no problem with the changes. They thought everything was just great. Any change in America was fine by them as they fiercely defended the American Way. To criticize was regarded by them as “anti-American.” And they were particularly proud because the party they resolutely voted for usually won the election.

  I maintained that the majority was always wrong, but learned not to voice anything like that at the dinner table. If I were to suggest, say, that cutting down millions of trees every Christmas seemed unnecessary, my dad would get exasperated because he thought it was a criticism of America.

  “Oh, Christy—those trees want to be cut down!”

  When I told them I wasn’t going to eat meat anymore, it all kicked off.

  “You’re going to eat meat and you’re going to be normal!”

  They thought I was going out of my way to be different. I didn’t dare say that I was having a moral dilemma. This was the generation gap in its formative stages.

  These things combined with what was happening in Vietnam meant that I and most of my peers were accusing our own parents of racism and bigotry. I see now that that was unfair and basically untrue. But they’d voted for the president who’d sanctioned the war in Vietnam, and they’d all joined the White Flight brigade moving out to the suburbs.

  They and their fathers had fought two world wars to defend America, and they didn’t see the need for change. They didn’t want anything to rock the boat. We, on the other hand, were only interested in rocking the boat. We wanted to rock.

  —

  The sixties were exploding with great bands, and not everything in rock had been explored. A bit of tape played backwards was innovative and wildly exciting—we were a rapt audience. We were explorers. We wante
d to nurture our consciousness, and we had a new world of mind-expanding aids to help us on our way. Pot and LSD would see us right on our journey of self-discovery.

  Nobody drank alcohol unless they were “straight.” You were either a “straight” or a “head.” We were heads. It was our own youth culture, a little like England’s mods and rockers but less style-driven. It was all about your allegiance and state of mind. Our state of mind was smoking pot (if we could get any); our allegiance, to Jim Morrison and whoever else was living on Love Street.

  I didn’t know it was LSD the first time I dropped it. Someone gave me a pill and I swallowed it when my parents were out playing bridge. I walked around the house on my own, looking at my shoes for a few hours, utterly transfixed. Shoes are remarkable things and I’d never noticed that before. Oh, it was acid, all right.

  Anything that lifted us out of the mental haze that school induced was invited in with open arms. School was a kind of torture and I couldn’t force myself to be good at it. I lived in dread of taking my report card home—a domestic upset which traumatized the Hynde house every six weeks. I surrendered to the inevitability of failure and got used to the idea. And then I didn’t care. Neither did Nita. We were willing losers. We stood up to face defeat with defensive arrogance. We had a band mentality.

  We were starting to lose respect for the older generation, as we became obsessed with things that they clearly had never thought about. We were pretty sure we had the answers. We made a point of making a point of it.

  By the time I was sixteen, words like “fascist” or worse entered my head as soon as my dad reeled off a demeaning retort to one of my “socially conscious” observations. My arguing with him enraged my mother, who regularly reminded me that I was the cause of her high blood pressure.

  Identical scenarios to ours were being enacted in millions of American households. Teenagers collectively started to dislike their own parents because of these shifting value systems. We became an army of parent-hating pot smokers.

  Thus my dismay and deep sorrow at the boarding-up of the downtown was something I kept to myself. Anyway, parents like mine had stopped going downtown in the sixties. They didn’t want to be around “a lower class of people”—poor people, in other words; down and outs.

  I didn’t think so at the time, but now I see that they were just ordinary hardworking supporters of the American Dream who had seen off two world wars and upheld their idea of American values in Akron, Ohio, for generations. If I even so much as mentioned my misgivings about the car culture, my dad would counter me with “Gol darn it, Christy! Americans are in love with their cars, don’t you know that?”

  I found that, in order not to provoke an argument, it was better to avoid any form of conversation. My trying to be different was, to their minds, intended as antagonism towards them. It was better to say nothing. Having a conversation was out of the question.

  Eventually, I’d have to walk.

  5

  WHLO APPRECIATION DAY

  It was another fine summer’s day when my friends and I set out for Chippewa Lake Park for WHLO Appreciation Day. WHLO was the local Akron radio station and radio was the beacon of light guiding our destinies; this day in particular would put me on my course.

  Not everybody was as governed by the music on the radio as I was. I hung out with those who were. We were elitists, my girl gang. We didn’t run with the guys, and we didn’t flirt or think of having boyfriends. The “popular” kids did stuff like “go steady.” We didn’t feature it ourselves. It was all about the music. Sex? Not on the agenda at all. We had better things to do.

  Debbie and Sue and Chons and Esta were in a band called the Poor Girls. I guess their parents didn’t see it as the threat that mine would have. In fact, my folks had bought me a guitar. But set me up professionally? That really would have been a step too far. They would never do anything that might put me in the company of guys with long hair.

  The Poor Girls even got a gig supporting Cream at the Akron Civic Theatre. I made Debbie a crushed-velvet vest/waistcoat with pearls sewn on to wear for their big night. And I waited by the backstage door as Cream left the building and poked my rolled-up poster of them through the throng of fans for the band to sign, which they did! I even stole the courage to tell Eric Clapton about a great guitar player to look out for, B.B. King. I’d heard him on WLAC, out of Nashville, and didn’t know if English guys would have known about him. (That’s what total dumbbells us kids in the Midwest were.)

  I hung out with Debbie, the bass player, a lot. She had the best collection of R&B records and we would go to a little shop downtown called Edfred’s to buy singles. Debbie had a poster in her room that said “God Save the Kinks”; I didn’t know it was a reference to “God Save the Queen”—the royal family and the English national anthem were unknown to me. Debbie had the coolest shoes, flat suede jobs, like desert boots but slinkier.

  Sue, the lead guitarist and singer, and I were born three days apart—our mothers were in the hospital together so I’d known her all my life. She got me a Bob Dylan record for my birthday once—a friend for life. She was blonde and Germanic-looking like Marlene Dietrich.

  Chons, on rhythm guitar, had long black hair and blue eyes and was the first person I ever met who said she never ate meat, and when she told me that, I never ate it again either. Best thing that ever happened to me. All it took was the mere suggestion. Nobody else was vegetarian that I knew of, but I started to think of meat-eating as a very weird practice and secretly regarded meat-eaters with distaste, almost contempt. Why would anyone kill an animal if they didn’t need to? I learned to live and associate with “the majority,” but never respected them. I got used to having this lack of regard for 97 percent of the population.

  Esta Kerr had a harder time. She was the drummer, and I think she had some problems and ended up in a mental hospital for life. LSD wasn’t a good idea for some of us.

  Becky Keene, who would later change her name to Meg, was from an intellectual family. She played jazz piano and there were lots of books all over her house. She wrote the song “Hymn to Her” years later that I did with the Pretenders. Becky was the most individual of all of us. She would go to Litchfield wearing an enormous Mexican skirt and cowboy boots, and a crowd would gather round her like she was in a freak show. She didn’t mind attracting that kind of attention; she was truly oblivious to criticism, almost arrogant in her defense.

  Angela was more of a space cadet than the rest of us. We smoked opium together and her insane laughter was unforgettable. I don’t remember how we got our hands on that shit. We were mad keen on smoking anything. She would get her kit off at the slightest suggestion and went on to be a stripper.

  Nita was still my closest ally. Her brother collected guns and her dad kept a rifle next to the front door. Her sister never left the attic, where she read books and stayed with her cats.

  Mary was from another intellectual family. She was good at art—we both liked to draw—and I think she made something of a career out of it later. Her dad had the ’56 Plymouth that we went to Cleveland to see gigs in.

  Shelly came from Holocaust survivors. Barb had tons of records. Her parents had a family-run Italian restaurant, Martini’s. We listened to the Beatles endlessly. I would call her up at seven after scrambling to “red up” the dishes when they played the Beatles countdown on WHLO—the Top 10 Beatles records of that day—and we would listen together in silence, phones to our ears, on our knees next to the family hi-fis. She had the first Kinks album, with “Stop Your Sobbing” on it. (Years later I heard a Scottish roadie say “red up” and learned it meant “rid”—“rid the table of dishes.”)

  —

  Of all the parents, mine were the straightest. Everybody was surprised to come to my house; it was so modern and clean. I didn’t take my friends there often—preferring to go over to their houses, where I could relax and say what I wanted—but when I did bring them to mine they would remark, “I can’t believe those a
re your and Terry’s parents!”

  My mother, ever-stylish and impeccable, was dismayed and certainly disappointed at having a hippie daughter and beatnik son. Parental disapproval meant I had to be stealthy in my behavior. It bugged me at the time, but had it not been for their total refusal to accept my need to rock, I might have stayed in Ohio and married a biker and be reaching under the sofa for my teeth now.

  The day at Chippewa Lake Park was, in some ways, the beginning of this story. Never mind the rides and watching fairground workers, the “fine guys,” who looked dangerous and worldly, there was something even better happening on that auspicious day. Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels were playing and, for me, life was about to change forever.

  Guitarist Jim McCarty, within the space of two songs, dismantled, rebuilt and changed my entire outlook on the world. He was a true guitar hero—the first I’d seen in the flesh. I felt what every teenage boy did when getting the bug. From that day on I regarded rock guitar as the pinnacle of life on earth. The fact that I was just a girl was irrelevant; the notion of being like McCarty was about a million miles out of my league anyway.

  Mitch Ryder himself was a superlative singer in the then new mode of “white soul.” He was a mesmerizing showman in his blousy pirate shirt and dress pants, his belt buckle slung to the side, resting provocatively on his hip bone. Slinky. He looked as sleazy as the guys working the bumper cars but had a voice implying lots of experience—experience I didn’t have. These guys were men.

  I was utterly entranced watching them when suddenly, mid-song, confusion derailed the performance and a fight broke out. A fight between band members! It was an out-and-out punch-up, the likes of which I’d only seen in barroom brawls on Have Gun—Will Travel. I was shocked, but found the fisticuffs as compelling as the music. Everything about the show was raw and dangerous and real. The music was manly and tough, the fight was the cherry on top.